Malcolm Gladwell on the Sociology of School Shooters and Police Bias

Malcolm Gladwell became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 1996, after nearly a decade at the Washington Post. That first year, he wrote a piece for the magazine called “The Tipping Point,” which considers the application of the theory of epidemics to the study of human behavior. What if homicides spread in the same way that the flu does? The piece eventually became the basis for a best-selling book of the same name, and it helped establish a template for the classic Gladwell story: speculative, wide-ranging, driven by big ideas.

For the second installment of the New Yorker Interview series, Gladwell talks to David Remnick about how he arrived at his particular approach. Taking ideas that he encountered in his reading, and using them to interpret events, writing “ruminations on what they mean,” became his way of exploring a subject in depth. Gladwell cites a recent instance of this approach as his favorite among the stories that he’s written for the magazine: “Thresholds of Violence,” from October, 2015, which draws on a Stanford sociologist’s ideas about how riots start as a possible, and partial, explanation for why school shootings have become more common in the United States.

Writing in such a speculative fashion always carries the risk of being wrong, and Gladwell describes his early writing in “The Tipping Point” on so-called broken-windows policing as a topic where his understanding of the subject has become more complex over time. His podcast, “Revisionist History,” dives into the past for things that have been overlooked or misunderstood, and he’s now working on a book that’s partly about interactions with strangers. It addresses “what happens when you confront someone that you neither know nor trust, and what are the mistakes that we make in that encounter.” The answer, Gladwell says, “is that we make a lot of mistakes.” And so, in the book that he’s writing now, he says, “I try to identify what those are and figure out what to do about them.”

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